Traveling through a network.

 Reflecting on your experience using the ping and traceroute commands, describe how packets travel through the network. Compare the ping and traceroute results from the different websites and explain how the paths to the different destinations differ. Make a conclusion about the relationship between the roundtrip time and geographical location.

Explain how the ping and traceroute commands can be used to troubleshoot Internet connection problems. Give at least two possible reasons why a ping request or traceroute command might time out or return with an error response.

It was pretty cool to learn about ping and traceroute. I was amazed at how fast information was received after a command was sent. According to our textbook, packets travel through the network by communication links like wires, fiber optic cables, and satellites to reach their destination (Vahid & Lysecky, zyBooks 2017).  Regarding ping and traceroute results, the ping results from each of the 3 websites performed fairly well being that there was a 0% loss in the packets sent. The milliseconds varied with each website but still delivered fast results. Ping is a test of speed and connection for a packet that is sent and received. Traceroute tracks the route of the packet as it goes to the IP address to another computer. In the 3 traceroutes I picked up I found that google.com timed out often compared to websites overseas. The timed-out could have been due to firewalls, network connection, an issue with the return. Also, another issue could be that the destination was not reachable in the network. I believe the geographical location has a lot to do with the time it takes to receive information but the roundtrip time varies with time out of a request. For example, we see how gov.au has better runtime than google.com because of all the timed out that slowed down the information be sent throughout the network.